06/17/2026
Congress is considering a proposal that would grant full retirement and disability benefits to combat veterans, while slashing future disability checks for veterans with tinnitus and sleep apnea.
The Take Care of America’s Veterans Act is a package with dozens of legislative proposals for veterans, caregivers, and survivors. Among the bundled bills is the Major Richard Star Act, which allows veterans with fewer than 20 years of service to collect both disability compensation and retirement pay at the same time. Over the last year, the Richard Star Act has been sidelined over debates of how it would be funded and whether the Department of Veterans Affairs can afford the estimated $10 billion in costs. To pay for it, Congress is considering an “offset” by cutting into future disability ratings for sleep apnea and tinnitus.
The legislative package would implement a previously proposed 2022 rule change for how the VA assesses sleep apnea and tinnitus disability ratings. It would replace the standalone 30% disability rating for sleep apnea and instead base it “on the effectiveness of medical treatment and intervention” and use a new scale of 0 to 100%. Tinnitus, which is currently rated as 10%, would be treated as a symptom of an underlying condition like hearing loss or a traumatic brain injury.
The proposal drew quick criticism from veteran service organization officials who warned that it would grant disability benefits to one group of veterans while taking away from another.
Officials with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or VFW, said in a statement last week that they “[refuse] to accept the idea that one group of veterans must lose so another group of veterans can win.”
